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NFL owners show little interest in smoothing over relationship with NFLPA

Hopefully NFLPA executive director De Smith will get a nice Valentine’s Day gift from his wife, because he definitely won’t be receiving any candy hearts from the NFL or the 32 owners today.

Though the owners are saying publicly that their only goal is to not miss any football in 2011 — “We certainly, unanimously want to get a deal done before we lose any play time,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said at the Senior Bowl — their actions at the negotiating table portray a much different message.

The NFLPA shouldn't expect any candy hearts from the NFL today

With a March 4 lockout date quickly approaching, the owners and NFLPA were supposed to sit down for two long bargaining sessions last week to start ironing out their differences. Instead, the owners ended the first day of negotiations early and canceled the next day’s session as well.

The NFL owners are now trying to play damage control, claiming that they didn’t abandon the negotiating process and instead are simply reassessing their options. But several observers — particularly Mike Florioat ProFootballTalk — are coming to the same conclusion we did last week:

The potential NFL lockout isn’t about the NFL having to change its system because of “economic realities,” as commissioner Roger Goodellhas said several times. Purely and simply, it’s about the owners wanting more money. And it appears they will try to bully the players until they get their way.

The players, who currently make about 59 percent of the league’s gross revenues (though that number is disputed), proposed a cut to 50 percent in the next CBA. Instead of making a counter-proposal, the owners simply walked away from the negotiating table.

“I’ve said it all along, owners want to break (the) players,” South Florida-based agent David Canter, who represents a handful of Dolphins players, said last night on Twitter.

What else did the NFLPA propose last week that the owners deemed to offensive?

Andrew Brandt of the National Football Post, and formerly the vice president of the Green Bay Packers from 1999-2008, has a terrific breakdown of the recent negotiations that went awry. It focused on one of the most important issues in this labor negotiation — a rookie salary cap, which both sides appear to want. But even with both the owners and players agreeing that unproven rookies should no longer receive large multi-million dollar contracts, the sides still remain far apart.

Read Brandt’s article for complete details of the proposals from both sides. For a Cliff’s Notes version, the NFLPA is willing to institute a salary cap for rookies, but want in return shorter contracts (allowing players to reach free agency, and a big pay day, more quickly), injury guarantees and assurances that the cost savings would be given to veteran players and to the pensions of retired players.

The owners, in return, want pre-determined contract values based on draft position, want to lock players into their contracts for 4-5 years, and don’t want to give the players any option to re-negotiate for outperforming their contracts. The NBA has a similar system for rookie contracts, but the NFL’s proposal is much more heavy-handed.

Brandt broke down how NFL rookies would be compensated based on the proposals made by the two sides compared to the current system.

As you can see, the players most affected would be the rookies taken at the top of the first round.

The issue of the rookie wage scale will eventually get ironed out, because both sides want it to happen. But it doesn’t appear that a new CBA will be agreed to — or a lockout be avoided — until the owners stop trying to impose its will on the NFLPA and instead make a good faith effort to negotiate.